
'Reflation-mania' sweeps the stock market | Charts that Count
2021-03-12T11:23:05Z

2021-03-12T11:23:05Z

2021-02-26T05:25:58Z
There are no upsides to a global health crisis.
But the coronavirus, if nothing else, has made debt cheaper to bear, throwing a lifeline to borrowers at a time of incredible financial stress.
Acute worries about future growth, abetted by an aggressive programme of bond buying by the US Federal Reserve, has driven the yield on the US 10-year Treasury down to just over half a per cent.
Other forms of debt caught in the same gravitational field are getting cheaper too.
But who benefits? Yes, governments and companies can borrow more cheaply.
But what about human beings? Perhaps the most important way that lower rates helps consumers and families is through lower-priced mortgages.
And indeed, the average rate on the US 30-year fixed rate mortgage has fallen to 3.5 per cent, by historical standards a very cheap mortgage.
One that any homeowner could brag about at a backyard barbecue, if we're ever going to have those again.
Look, however, at that little spike in mortgage rates just after the Covid crisis began.
Investors, spooked by the idea that homeowners would default on their mortgages, lost their appetite for mortgage debt.
That left mortgage lenders with no place to sell newly originated mortgages to.
Mortgage prices spiked and the market clogged, prompting the Fed to step in and buy mortgage bonds directly.
That seemed to work, bringing mortgage prices down.
But let's look closer.
This last chart shows the difference between the 30-year mortgage rate and the 10-year Treasury.
This spread, as it is known, usually hovers at around 1.5 to 2 percentage points.
This week, it stands at 3 per cent.
In other words, mortgages are not cheap, not cheap at all given where government debt is trading.
If the Fed wants consumers to get the full benefit of low interest rates, it still has more work to do.
What's wrong with this picture? The red line is initial US jobless claims of which there have been about 26 million in the past five weeks.
The blue line is the S&P 500, which is up almost 30% from its lows in the latter part of March.
Now, no one wants to pile a financial crisis on top of a public health crisis.
But it is very fair to ask why the stock market is feeling so enthusiastic when millions of Americans are out of work, and hundreds of thousands of businesses are still shuttered.
There are two basic points to keep in mind about this at the outset.
The first is that the stock market is not the consumer economy.
The S&P 500 is about 25% tech stocks.
Another 15% is in health care.
And both of these sectors have done very well through the crisis, supporting the rest of the index.
The second point is that monetary policy still matters and matters immensely.
Central bank's easing of interest rates and their purchases of bonds have driven fixed income yields down to almost uninvestable levels.
This in turn forces investors who require real returns into the stock market.
But is either one of these factors really enough to explain the strength we see in stocks? I don't think that they do.
I think there is another assumption at play-- the so-called V-shaped recovery, the idea that the economy, once the virus crisis passes, will rebound very quickly and hit its old levels of growth.
There is also the assumption that this V-shaped recovery will happen relatively soon.
But are we really so confident in this?
Last week, the US automaker Ford issued bonds at a yield of nearly 10%, showing just how much investors demand to be paid if they are going to put their money at risk in a company that depends on the strength of the American consumer.
Oil for future delivery recently fell to negative price.
The market is not as strong as it seems.
Be careful out there.
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